The Death of a Gun-Rights Warrior
Illustrations by Adams Carvalho
This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace.
One Saturday night in April 2017, Jenn Jacques and Bob Owens stayed up late drinking at an outdoor bar in Atlanta. They had worked together for more than two years, and Owens had become like an older brother to Jacques. On this Saturday, Owens seemed relaxed and was looking forward to the future; he talked about an upcoming family vacation. “That was such a special night,” Jacques told me. “I can say that there was no warning.”
They were both in their 40s, and had spouses and kids back home. Jacques lived in Wisconsin, and Owens in North Carolina. They were in town for the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. Together, they edited a popular gun-rights news and opinion website called Bearing Arms.
As a blogger, Owens was often combative and blunt. He had a tendency to mock those who disagreed with him; he believed that gun-control advocates were performative and that they ignored inconvenient facts. A few days earlier, he’d written that protesters who were planning a “die-in” near the NRA convention were staging “a dramatic hissy fit.”
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But the man Jacques knew was different. “His personality was as calm as his southern drawl,” she said. “The man was so levelheaded and thoughtful and kind, deliberate and generous.” Owens had coached his older daughter’s soccer team, and he went to equine therapy with his younger one, who had been diagnosed with autism. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, but he also sang karaoke and watched Disney movies with the kids and his wife, Christine.
Another time when he and Jacques were out drinking, Owens decided he didn’t like the way a man was talking to her. “Sir, I would never hope to get in a fight with anyone,” Owens said to him, “but I will take you down if you go near this woman again.” Jacques laughed and told him to stop. “He was so serious in protecting others,” she said.
That night in Atlanta, Owens and Jacques were in a reflective mood. They discussed their families and aging.
“My grandma is going to be 86,” Jacques said.
“I hope I make it that long,” Owens said.
At one point, the conversation drifted to suicide.
“The most selfish thing you can do is take yourself away from your kids,” Jacques said.
“I could never do it,” Owens replied.
From time to time, Owens wrote fiery posts about public figures he saw as antagonistic toward gun rights. One subject was a doctor named Arthur Kellermann, whose research had indicated a troubling link between guns and suicide.
In 1984, Kellermann, then 29, was earning a master’s degree in public health at the University of Washington in Seattle. One day, he was sitting in the student center between classes when he heard on the news that the singer Marvin Gaye had been fatally shot with a .38-caliber revolver by his own father.
Kellermann had grown up in a conservative household in Tennessee. His father owned guns, and had taught Kellermann to shoot at the age of 10. But Gaye’s shooting, which had happened at home, got Kellerman thinking about his recent experience working in an emergency room. He had seen a number of gunshot victims, but he couldn’t remember treating a single patient who had been shot while breaking into someone’s home.
[Daniel Levitin: The ineluctable logic of gun ownership]
This prompted Kellermann to seek out research measuring the risks and benefits of keeping a firearm in the home. But he couldn’t find much, so he decided to embark on a simple study of his own.
With the help of the local medical examiner, Kellermann reviewed every gunshot death that had occurred in King County, where the university was located, from 1978 through 1983. During that period, there had been 398 fatalities in homes that contained a firearm. Fifty had been homicides—and of those, only nine involved self-defense. Twelve shootings had been accidents, and three deaths couldn’t be categorized. The remaining 333 incidents—almost 85 percent of the deaths—were suicides.
Kellerman’s study, titled “”, was published in in 1986. Because the data set was limited, he avoided drawing firm conclusions, but the numbers immediately attracted attention. A summarizing the analysis began, “Keeping firearms in the home may endanger, not protect, the individuals who live there.” At the time, research suggested that half of all American households contained at least one gun.
